Time Machine lost all backups after Lion upgrade

After Lion upgrade TM asked me to perform a 13 hours backup; I've agreed but now the oldest backup is 3 days ago. What is happened?
Please can somebody help me?
Thanks

I can't help here, but before I upgraded my old G5 (OS 10.5.8) TM popped up a message saying that old files had just been deleted. That was what TM does when its HD is getting full. But this was strange because I knew that I had lots of TM space, and since the last use of the conputer (about 2 hours before) I certainly had not saved to the internal HD several GB of files. To my astonishment, all but the last 4 weeks of files had been deleted, back to Jan 2010! GetInfo said that the space left was about the same as before the incident, whereas it should have shown a huge amount of free space.
I deleted all the remaining backup files and started again. It shook my confidence in TM's ability ot provide a reliable backup system. Now I regard it as a useful source of recovering old versions of files (eg., text, images etc.), rather than as a means to restore the system hard drive. Fortunately, I have been using Carbon Copy Cloner for years to make bootable backups of the whole system HD which can then be used, by simply cloning back to the system HD, to get back to work using the state of the HD when I last cloned. Alternately, the clone on the backup disc can be simply examined in the Finder to recover individual files.

Similar Messages

Time Machine does not work after Lion Upgrade

Hi all.
I upgraded my iMac to Lion yesterday. I used to run Time Machine through my airport extreme to an external hdd.
After the upgrade to Lion I'm unable to do this. When I try to setup Time Machine again, it is not possible to connect to the HDD throught the Airport Extreme. I do find the external HDD in Finder, but not able to access it.
The HDD is a Samsung 1 TB.
Is this a known issue and is it any possible fixes in the near future?
Thanks!

Hi
It probably doesn't help you directly but I have Lion performing time machine backups onto an external disk via airport extreme. Have you upgraded the firmware on the airport extreme recently?
Cheers
Tom

Time machine lost back ups after Mavericks "upgrade"

I upgraded to mavericks yesterday after doing a time machine back up. Installation went well but this morning my imac had to back up 500GB and when that was done all of my old back ups are gone. When I enter time machine it just has 3 hours of back ups! Can anyone offer a solution as to how to get my back ups...obviously time machine is out!
Thanks
Peter

I had this too. I figured out that in my case the problem was that I had updated to the new iMovie library. It was only after I had done this that I found out that iMovie 2013 creates a new package folder with all of the existing movie events in it. As I had just under 500gb of movies I had suddenly got an "extra" 500gb.
The result was that there was not enough space on the Time Machine drive to accommodate the new back up size - so it ditched the older backups. And in fact ditched everything but the most recent backup. I thne made some changes and ended up in a loop with insufficient space for new backups.
I don't know if this is the problem which afflcited you but thought I should mention it.

Time Machine Deleted All Backups After Restore

Had a very strange thing happen...I had to do a clean reinstall of Mountain Lion and manually add back everything from various backups. After the reinstall (including a completely new computer name), I was able to access all the old Time Machine backups to restore folders from. However, once I restored one folder, TM wrote over the entire old set of backups (over 6 months worth) with a new backup of the current state, deleting everything and renaming the containing folder to the new computer name. Is there any way I can get back what it deleted? How could this have happened?
No doubt Im done using Time Machine...no matter how anal I am about backing up, I still end up losing tons of irreplacable data (I had much of the TM backup also backed up on another external drive but, go figure that drive would fail literally simultaneously as this incident).
Any suggestions on how to move forward, if possible at all?
Thanks!

Depending on how you restored your data, Time Machine may not recognize your previous backups as belonging to the same machine. It will then delete as many snapshots as necessary to make room for a full backup of all files. Once the snapshots are deleted, they can't be recovered.
Another time, when you erase the boot volume, restore from Time Machine in Setup Assistant so that your backup history will be preserved.
As this experience shows, you need more than one backup to be safe. I suggest you start a new backup set on another, larger, external drive.

Lost all contacts after software upgrade can anyone help

lost all contacts after software upgrade of my phone and cant get them from outlook to address book on my mac to get them back

Suggest that you cross-post over in one of the iWeb forums.
!http://i50.tinypic.com/izvwo1.gif!

Time Machine lost all old backups

I have an iMac 24" with a 750GB drive that only has about 200GB full. I have been using Time Machine to do backups onto a 400GB hard drive, and it has been working fine for a few weeks. Last week I copied 250GB of material onto my Mac's HD (as a backup of an external drive), but set that folder NOT to be backed up in TM (this worked fine). Then yesterday I renamed that folder... and Time Machine tried to include it in the next backup... and that backup failed, of course, since there is now more that 400GB of material to backup. Ooops... I have put that renamed folder onto the exclude list.
BUT, in the process of failing to backup, Time Machine appears to have deleted all of the previous backups from the 400GB Time Machine drive. The weeks of backups are gone. THAT was very disappointing. I thought Time Machine wasn't supposed to delete old backups without warning me (I have that option checked). Why did it do that??
(Happily, I have also been making backups manually onto other drives, and my main drive is still happy, so no files were lost... but I want to understand what happened before I trust my backups to Time Machine. I realize that I accidentally asked Time Machine to do an impossible thing by suddenly dropping that extra 250GB folder into its world, but why did it fail so ungracefully and delete all my old backups? This could be very bad if it happed to someone who was counting on Time Machine.)

This is TRULY a serious software design bug IMO and should be reported to Apple via their Feedback procedure. I also have seen this bug and I've reported it to Apple. You should also to add more weight to the bug report and to hopefully have Apple resolve this soon for all of us.
TM does fail to alert the user with a request that to free up backup space some older backups will need removing. Not only this but it silently removes the oldest backups trying to free up space only to find there's still insufficient space. This is clearly a very serious problem as you've discovered.

Time Machine Combines all Backups?

Hey,
Why did my time machine combine all my old backups? I can no longer go past my last backup. It's like it merged them all into the most recent. This is the second time it has done this. Does anyone know why or how to stop it from doing it?
I already checked out this page http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306928
and I have an apostrophe in my name but it hasn't ever been a problem. It's like when I reach a certain number of backups it consolidates them into one and starts over?
Message was edited by: amsgator

This is normal time machine behavior. After 24 hours, the backups collapse into 1 day. After 37 days or so, the first seven days collapse into 1 week. At some point you will have the last 24 hours, the last 30 days and weekly backups going back in time until your disk is full. If you think about it, it is very unlikely you will need a file from a certain hour 1 week or 30 days ago. It makes sense to collapse the backups into snapshots as time goes on. The more recent backups are more important. I hope I understood your question...
Message was edited by: Myron Jones

Time machine will not backup after maverick

This is a major problem, not addressed in the installation instrucitons. The disk runs eternally "preparing backup", I mean all night.
This happened to two machines on entirely separate backup disks. And if we are sacraficing the old data in reformating the drive, I would like to know about that before choosing to upgrade.

Update: Finally...
At least for the Promise Pegasus R4... but I noticed on other threads that WD drives are also acting up too so this might work with them too.
I turned off Time Machine, and deleted that pesky .plist file, again. I unplugged the R4, power and thunderbolt, then played whack the gopher with the drives swapping them around randomly. I reintalled Mavericks from a fresh download, yet again, then set Time Machine to backup on a fast USB 3TB drive (which it did in 6 hours or so). Then I turned off Time Machine, deleleted that .plist file again, rebooted the iMac, plugged in the R4, reformatted it again with Disk Utility, then hooked it to Time Machine, said a few slightly heretic prayers to whatever demons came with Maverick, and 2 minutes later Time Machine started to backup and report 1 hour to complete... the hour isn't up yet, but I'm crossing everything I have 2 of...
I've noticed a few other 'didn't copy over or mesh well' things with Maverick, but that's a different thread and 2 updates from now once we all suffer through this extended beta-test by Apple.
John Galt posted this on another thread... to find and delete that pesky .plist file:
or "error ... while creating the backup folder."
and follow that to:
http://pondini.org/TM/A4.html

Time Machine - lost incremental backup

The preferences panel for Time machine says it keeps
* hourly backups for the past 24 hours,
* daily backups for the past month,
* weekly backups until your disk is full.
I notice that the reduction of hourly backups to one backup for a day appears to keep the earliest (incremental) backup for that day and deletes the rest.
To test this, I created a small file on the desktop on 13th Oct 2008 at 18:30, let time machine back it up at 18:45 and I then moved the file from the desktop to the trash at 19:00.
I checked that the file existed in the time machine backup for 18:45.
As I suspected, Time machine has only kept one backup for 13 Oct timed 12:01 am. The file is not in the backup for the 13th or 14th Oct (it is now 15th Oct). The original file is still in my trash.
If this had been an important file that I had deleted accidentally, I would not be very happy.
For the record I am using a MacBook running OS 10.5.5 using a 500Gb Seagate FreeAgent drive connected via firewire.
Shouldn't Time Machine consolidate all the incremental backups for one day into the one backup that it keeps (and eventually consolidate the daily backups into the weekly one that it keeps) so that files are not 'lost' in this way?
Arthur L.

Welcome to Discussions.
[This|http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisemac/archives/2007/12/howleopardtim.html] explains it well:
"As Apple presents the Time Machine filesystem view, you can see your system approximately:
As it was at the top of each hour today
As it was each day for the past 30 days, starting yesterday
As it was each week, starting 31 days ago, going back as far as disk space permits
A distraught user might only be interested in the amount of data he may have lost:
If you accidentally deleted a file today, you lose up to an hour's work
If you deleted it between yesterday and 30 days ago, you lose up to a day's work
If you deleted it more than 30 days ago, you can lose up to one week's work, or all of it."
Hopefully the file you've lost took longer than an hour to create than the example you tried.
/p

Time machine won't work after mavericks upgrade

Is there a way to fix it? Time machine is stuck saying it's preparing for backup.

Others here wouldnt recommend it, but on a new OS install, since I have a giant pile of HD, ...i just grab another HD and create a new fresh Time Machine backup
after its complete, I take the original HD with the OLD backup and format/erase it.
Im a tad too lazy to wait, as you yourself mentioned, 1 hour for TM just to PREPARE to backup. Nope, no,...not gonna do it.
I updated 4 Macs to Mavericks and id rather make a wholly NEW Time Machine backup on another HD and erase the original.
Since I keep about 12+ redundant archives of my important data, I have no worry on earth of ever losing data.
Time machine is a backup, NOT an archive for vital data.
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection

Time Machine Won't Work after Maverick Upgrade

Hi,
I updated my operating system to Maverick the other day.
Today I tried to restore a file from Time Machine, but when I "Enter Time Machine" none of the functions seems to work.
I tried to press pretty much every date, and every button, but nothing works.
Any suggestions on what to do short of restoring to the old ios?
Thanks.

Others here wouldnt recommend it, but on a new OS install, since I have a giant pile of HD, ...i just grab another HD and create a new fresh Time Machine backup
after its complete, I take the original HD with the OLD backup and format/erase it.
Im a tad too lazy to wait, as you yourself mentioned, 1 hour for TM just to PREPARE to backup. Nope, no,...not gonna do it.
I updated 4 Macs to Mavericks and id rather make a wholly NEW Time Machine backup on another HD and erase the original.
Since I keep about 12+ redundant archives of my important data, I have no worry on earth of ever losing data.
Time machine is a backup, NOT an archive for vital data.
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection

Time Machine: Missing Snow Leopard backups after Lion Upgrade.

I regulary use Time Machine for backups to my WD drive through my network. After I upgraded to Lion I could not back up to my network drive I learned through various forums that my WD drive required a firmware update, to work with Lion. I upgraded the firmware and now I no longer have my Time Machine backups from Snow Leopard, only backups from Lion, any idea how I can locate my Snow Leopard backups?

Pondini wrote:
I'd be the first to agree that keeping two sets of backups, one a "clone," is prudent.
But if you have a Snow Leopard clone, then upgrade to Lion, the next time you update the clone you'll lose the Snow Leopard version entirely.
Yes, I was caught out early, so I have a selection of backup drives now to keep everything backed up as safely as possible. Although at the moment, I'm not seeing any reason to go back to Snow Leopard, and all my media is safe. Hopefully in the near future my SL backups can go and I can get ready for the next OS when it comes along.
Thanks

Error-1 time machine backups after lion upgrade

I upgraded to Lion on both my computers. My iMac Time Machine Backups are fine - it's connected by firewire to an external hard drive.
BUT my Macbook Tim Machine Backups are wireless using our Time Capsule and the backups are stored on the Time Capsule.
Since upgrading, The backups fail & I get this error: The backup disk image “/Volumes/Brunnertime/LittleOne (2).sparsebundle” could not be accessed (error -1).
Just like so many other unhappy Lion users.
One positive abberation - Last night, I went into Time Machine Preferences, re-selected the appropriate backup disk (our Time Capsule), entered the password, started a backup and VOILA it backed up fine. All night long, it did hourly backups.
This morning? Once again, the backups are FAILING with that same error - The backup disk image “/Volumes/Brunnertime/LittleOne (2).sparsebundle” could not be accessed (error -1).
Plus, now there are NO backups on the disk. Huh?
At this point we are disgusted that both Lion and iCloud (that's another longer story) were released before they should have been. Too many bugs.

Hey, finally I found a permanent fix for this issue. I read about it at another Apple Discussions Forum, but right now I don't remember where.
It worked for me at least. In my case it seems that some Western Digital (WD) software was causing the issue. I just uninstalled WDSmartWare from my iMac using that application's own uninstaller, rebooted my Mac and, finally, after months of calling Apple Support with no luck, it all started to work normally again, so check if you have some WD software running on your Mac. In my case I didn't even need that WD software, as I had it because I used to back up to a WD Drive which I don't use anymore since I bought my Time Capsule.
Feel free to reply if you require any further assistance.
Good Luck.

How does time machine handle initial backup after upgrading to Yosemite?

HI All,
I'm wondering if Time machine will create a "new" full backup of the system after I upgrade to Yosemite.
I'm trying to make sure I can backout (revert to previous backup of Mavericks) of the upgrade should I run into trouble.
Thanks,
Eddy817

besides restoring just one file, that is what Time machine DOES. See this article:
Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions -- 14. How do I restore my entire system?
If you are deeply concerned, you may want make a copy of your entire system before updating (Clone your old system) or Install onto a Blank drive and add your files to that.
If you make NO preparation and do not have a Backup, the only way to install a previous versions is to do so onto a Blank drive. Also, you must have PURCHASED (even for $0) a copy of Mavericks, or it will not be available for re-download.

Exposé hot keys disabled after Time Machine "Delete all backups of file"

I have been having the same problem that was initially mentioned in this topic:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5850265#5850265
Namely, sometimes after I restart all of my Exposé and Dashboard hot keys have been turned off (but not the Spaces hotkey, just F9-F12). My hot corners for turning off or on the screensaver work just fine, but I have to manually go in and turn back on my Exposé hot keys. Some people said it was associate with WoW, but I am not running World of Warcraft. This last time it happened (this morning), I had removed all backups of a few files in Time Machine (what's the point of having a backup of a rented movie after the 24 hour viewing period has expired?). I have been looking for a way to report this to Apple, but have been unable thus far.
I just tested it to see if you have to restart, and you do not. About thirty minutes ago I turned all the Exposé hot keys on, and just a minute ago I deleted a backup of a file on my Desktop in Time Machine (by selecting, "Delete all backups of file ______") and the hot keys had been disabled again.
Does anyone know if there is a way to fix this?

Mechanist wrote:
At some point I told Time Machine to get rid of backups of a particular file using the "Delete all backups of ..." option. Time Machine duly deleted the backups of the file and stopped making new ones.
Not exactly. It did delete the existing backups, but didn't make any new ones because the file hasn't changed since then.
The easiest way to get it to back it up is to make a minor change to it (the name or something in the contents), then change it back. Time Machine should back it up on the next backup.
Alternatively, you need to force a "deep scan," where Time Machine compares everything on your system to the backups. Usually, just starting up from your Recovery HD will do that, although sometimes you have to start from it and Repair your internal HD to trigger it.
If you're not sure how to do that, see Using the Recovery HD and/or #6 in Using Disk Utility.

Time Machine lost all backups after Lion upgrade

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